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Progenitor Triumphs Over Monolith
This past weekend saw a marathon launch attempt to overcome the Monolith’s newfound ability to create weather unsuitable for rocket flight. It ultimately took a lot of patience but we were rewarded with a successful mission and the full analysis for it was just released earlier today. Progenitor teams are now looking ahead to the next Mk6 mission and being able to reveal more information about the upcoming Mk7 next week.
Ascension Prepares for Next Flight
The last flight of the Ascension rocket was its most complex to date and the post-flight analysis rightly took a good deal of time to complete as not only the rocket performance needed to be assessed but several new components as well. The flight analysis published earlier this week has all the details and the program is now waiting to hear from the capsule team on whether it is suitable for a test flight on the next launch. We should know next week.
KerBalloon Dispatches Teams on Multiple Contracts
The KerBalloon program page has quite the list of contracts active currently, as the new strategy of growing and splitting the crew into two separate teams for high and low altitude missions has allowed them to expand operations. Most of last year was spent on long expeditions with a single team for both high and low altitude missions and led to a decrease in income from earlier years. This year will hopefully see a resurgence and help return us to profit for 2019.
ATN Database
The latest update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 3,160 asteroids and 2 updated with new observation data.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 1/20/19
Another week down and still managing to stay ahead, even with some additional IRL stress going on. Good stuff.
Mk6 flight
Yea so I probably gave myself a lot more work in concocting and playing out the new Monolith plot line (not over yet, of course) which is of course ironic because I was being lazy and not wanting to do work that made me sit around and think about it. Funny how that works.
The telemetry error was completely real, that instruction happening before the rocket defined itself as “flying” was not something I ever thought would happen. The game likely just managed to pause for a garbage collection right at that exact moment so it sat on the pad a split second longer while the kOS code continued to evaluate.
I also didn’t think to re-activate the telemetry data mid-flight. I reset the launch and fixed the code instead, but later while writing up the tweets to post during the flight I was like – oh duh! The way the AFCS is really set up I could have actually just written and uploaded a new command file that would start a new logging loop. I think that’s really cool that I could actually do that and not just write about it being done.
Ops Tracker
Since I’ve got a little over 3-weeks lead time right now (trying to do 2 operation days per real day while things are slowed down a bit) I actually managed to get started working on the v10 milestone for the Ops Tracker and did a few simple bug fixes and new features. Hopefully by the time everyone reads this I will have it completed but if not I’m aiming to get it all done by March at the latest. The real-time telemetry will be a big deal, thankfully I already did it once so I have the old code to base off of but that was largely done in ASP not JavaScript so I will still have to mostly rewrite the whole system.
